Of bathrooms, going slow, and managing not to fall out of the sky

I've been a bad blogger. Bad, bad blogger. When I started this, part of the idea was that it would act as a way of me consolidating what I'd learned, in order to write these posts I must have remembered at least something.

So, what have I been up to? I've been flying - perhaps not as much as I'd have liked to, having spent enough money to get my licence on refitting the bathroom. They say you can't fly a house, but you also can't shower in (most) aircraft. I have got a few hours under my belt though, mainly doing some of the bits of flying that I don't really want to do.

When I refer to bits that I don't want to do, I mean the bits that are, frankly, just no fun. The bits where they teach you to fly in a way that you just don't want to do in reality, mainly so that you know when you're about to get into something bad, and how to get out of it.

My first not-particularly-fun lesson was slow flight. The aircraft has speeds it likes to fly at, and speeds where it really doesn't want to be flown, and as you get into the bottom end of its operating range, it becomes a bit of a pig to fly. None of the controls respond to the light touches that they normally do. Years ago, I owned an absolute shed of a Land Rover Discovery; one day, the power steering pump failed in the middle of me navigating a mini roundabout. Suddenly, a vehicle I could steer by fingertip pressure only became something that took considerable feats of strength to manage - and that's possibly the best analogy I can think of for how the aircraft was behaving.

After that came the bathroom, and months of penury. I decided that having a quick refresher lesson was in order, and so I spent an hour or so going back over everything that I'd managed to get rusty on. With that out of the way, it was back to doing things I didn't want to do.

So... stalling.

When I mentioned I was doing stalling, a family member asked "But what if you can't get the engine started again?". In aircraft terms, the word 'stall' has nothing to do with the engine, but rather relates to the wings - a glider, which doesn't even have an engine, is perfectly capable of being stalled.

I figured it was time for a picture, mainly because I was getting fed up looking at a wall of text, but also because it helps illustrate what I'm talking about. The image above which I lifted from Wikipedia shows the forces on the wing: thrust from the engine (pulling it through the air), drag from the air (resisting the thrust), lift (from the wing doing its thing) and the weight of the aircraft, trying to pull the whole thing back to earth and opposing the lift.

These forces oppose each other. If you've got more lift than you have weight, you go up. More weight than lift, you go down. The stall is a condition where the lift packs in and suddenly weight becomes far more of a problem than it was moments earlier. What this means in practical terms is that you stop flying, and start falling.

Stalls happens when the angle the wing cuts through the air at (the angle of attack) becomes too steep, and the airflow over the top of the wing gets all messed up. Unfortunately, the syllabus says that I can't just be told this, and I have to actually experience it.

Before doing this, we make sure we're safe to do it. Safe. To basically stop flying. Ooookaaaay... Time for an acronym. HASELL

Height - High enough that we're not going to hit something when we inevitably lose height.
Airframe - Flaps set, brakes off (presumably the brakes being off is one less thing to worry about if it all goes Pete Tong and we find ourselves landing off-airfield).
Security - Harness on, door closed, anything heavy strapped well down so I don't get clobbered in the back of the head by my flight bag.
Engine - Still running. Still got fuel. Not doing anything it shouldn't.
Location - No airfields/controlled airspace/cloud. Not over a a built up area. Let's not dwell on why we're avoiding built up areas - it's not a happy thought to be having.
Lookout - Make sure we're not going to hit another aircraft.

What follows this is the most counter-intuitive thing I've done since starting to learn to fly. I pulled the power back, and tried raising the nose. As we got slower, raising the nose became harder and harder, needing a really firm pull on the controls to do it. The whole thing feels wrong, especially when combined with the knowledge that you're deliberately going to stall the thing, instinct tells you to lower the nose straight away and stop mucking about. In fact, I did that on at least one occasion and got told off by my instructor. As you keep doing it, the aircraft's stall warner realises what you're doing, and a really annoying "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" sound fills the cabin. This is where you really should stop it and lower the nose. But not today, we're going to keep pulling back, which is now getting really hard to do. Things start to shake. It really isn't fun. And then it happens - the aircraft suddenly drops its nose.

This is really where the title of the blog comes in, it's part of a longer saying. "Push the stick forward, the houses get bigger. Pull it back, they get smaller. Keep pulling it back, the houses keep getting smaller until they suddenly get bigger again." - that last bit where the houses suddenly get bigger is the stall.

So, now we're falling. Fortunately, this isn't half as bad as it sounds. Push the controls forward and stick some power in - and we've recovered.

OK, so it's nothing I couldn't have learned from reading it, but the syllabus (and common sense) demands that pilots can recognise and recover from a stall, and that's why there's two whole lessons on stalling in there.

My second stalling lesson was yesterday. It was a glorious day on the ground, which unfortunately translated into a horrible one once I got in the air. The rising heat from the ground might have made glider pilots jump with joy, but it pretty much thwarted my attempts at flying straight and level. Fortunately, once outside the airport's airspace, we were able to climb to clearer air. The rising heat was still clear from the lack of any real horizon; as a visual pilot, you're taught to fly with reference to the actual horizon rather than relying on the artificial horizon instrument - well, today, the real horizon was a sort of fuzzy grey band. I picked a spot in the fuzz that I thought might have been the actual horizon, and decided to stick to that, which sort of worked.

A quick couple of clean stalls, just to make sure I'd not forgotten last lesson, then into stalling with flaps and stalling on approach. Although we were practicing these at 4000 feet, had they happened in reality the chances are I'd be on approach to a runway, and therefore quite a lot closer to the ground, so my instructor was naturally keen to make sure I'd nailed it!

Sorted. Great. Home again. Decending down to 1500 feet for the run in to the airport, things got grotty again. This is normally the bit where after the hard work, I get to relax and enjoy the flight, but I was back to constantly having to correct the aircraft after it had been pushed off course. Bah!

My instructor talked me through the approach, with me taking the aircraft right down to the point where we'd be flaring for the landing. Next lesson, I'll hopefully be taking it all the way down onto the tarmac. "We'll probably have some very hard landings next time" he told me with a grin.

In the mean time, I need to hit the theory books. Air Law is something I need to get sorted before I do my first solo, and I need to get my medical sorted too - hopefully that'll just be a formality, although it seems that it takes an hour, which will be the longest I'll have ever spent in the presence of a doctor.

Lesson seven: In which I feel a bit like Goldilocks

For all the rain and coldness that's typical for this time of year, autumn does occasionally pull a truly excellent day out of the hat. Today was one of those days. Scarely a cloud in the sky, no wind, and reasonably warm to boot. Who could ask for more?

So, off to the airport. The briefing room was in use, so my instructor shoved me out of the door onto the apron, and got me to do the walk around on the aircraft we were going to take. All done, back indoors, head out to the aircraft, and... the right hand seat had an issue, and couldn't be fixed.

Ho-hum. Never mind, there were other planes. The instructor went to book out another aircraft, while I did another walk around. In we climbed - checked the seat; all OK. Checked the brakes. Hum. Problem. Oh boy, the mechanics are going to be busy tomorrow.

Right, third time's the charm, yes? Again, the instructor disappeared while I did a walk around. I was happy. We climbed in, more checks. Yes, we were both happy. Off to go - a mere hour later than planned, but never mind. Today's lesson was to be turning - yes, another one of those things that I've been doing all along, but now I get to do it properly.

I don't know why, but for the first ten minutes, my left arm seemed to be unnaturally heavy; if I wasn't paying attention, we'd find that I'd dropped my left hand, and we weren't flying level. Time to give myself a talking to. With that sorted, onwards and upwards, ready to start making new and different mistakes.

Turning - or specifically, turning properly - involves quite a few things, not least of which is keeping a good lookout to make sure you're not going to run into anything; on several occasions, I found that I was keeping my head down in the cockpit, before reminding myself that if I was going to hit anything, I'd stand a better chance of seeing it if I looked out of the windscreen. Having mastered keeping a lookout (and there were a few other things in the air, not least a few helicopters), I moved on to forgetting to keep the nose up - scarcely a turn went by where we didn't end up heading towards the ground.

Once I'd mastered not heading towards the ground, we started... ummm... doing just that. I'd be learning to do turns with 30° of bank, meaning that you can see the ground out of the side window fairly well. Combined with a decent, the overall vision is one of a death spiral!

By the time we'd finished doing all of that, we had to head back to the airport. Being a nice clear, sunny day, the ground had warmed up a treat, and we were treated to some light turbulence to liven things up.

Coming in to land, we were sandwiched between larger aircraft; an airbus had not long taken off, and there was one a few miles behind us as well; my instructor took over in order to get us down, and off the runway as quickly as possible. We deliberately approached higher than normal (not a problem, given the length of my local airport's runway, compared to the landing distance required by the little Piper) in order to avoid the wake turbulence from the larger aircraft that had just taken off; the wake of a large plane (or even a helicopter) can cause all manner of fun and games for pilots of smaller aircraft, including tipping them completely upside down! Best avoid that, then. Shame, because it looks so pretty in the picture.

Lesson six: In which I attempt to avoid crude jokes about going down

One of these. Bigger than my old Fiat 500
with wings - but still bloody tiny.

Damn you, real life; will you please stop getting in the way of learning to fly? It's September, and I've just managed my second lesson of the year. Fingers crossed, getting a proper job instead of mucking around as a contractor will mean I can budget a bit better, and fit some more regular lessons in. That said, with summer having finished as promptly as it began, we'll have to see what winter throws at us. The last 24 hours here seem to have been dominated by howling gales, so let's hope that's not going to be the theme for the next few months.

As my last lesson was climbing, the logical way to follow on was descending - of course, I'd descended at least once in all of my previous lessons in order to get back on the ground, but this time I was going to do it properly. I was in a Piper again, having decided to make the switch from the smaller Cessna. On reflection, I think I'm starting to like the aircraft. Although the Cessna feels more responsive (almost twitchy, sometimes) the Piper handles what the weather throws at it somewhat better. Furthermore, it cruises at a rather different attitude - whilst the little Cessna is somewhat nose-up, obscuring much of what's directly ahead of you, the Piper shows you a bit more of the landscape.

To add a bit more interest to the day, the weather had decided to throw me a curve ball. I've flown from my local airport many a time, either sitting at the pointy end of a light aircraft, or sitting further back on something far bigger. Every single time, I'd always taken off in the same direction, but this time the wind direction meant I was going to see it from the other end. Well, I was excited about it, even if nobody else is.

I got to do my first walkaround check of the aircraft - making sure that both wings were in the place where the factory had left them and all that jazz, and clambered inside. Despite having two more seats than the Cessna, the Piper has only one door, and it's not on the pilot's side. Getting in when you're more than about 5'8" requires a bit of contortion, but I managed to get there somehow. Off we went, up into the wide blue yonder, to fly over a bit of the countryside that's now getting to look hugely familiar to me.

There's a certain slightly alarming element about descending, in that the term 'aim point' comes into your vocabulary. Of course, this is intended to be about aiming for runway thresholds and the like, but during my lesson, my aiming point ended up being a lighthouse. Managing to surpress thoughts about how aiming a light aircraft at a lighthouse is a stupid thing to be doing, we descended. Then climbed. Then descended. And climbed again. I became aware that I was completely incapable of climbing and maintaining a heading at the same time. Oopsie, forgot about the rudder pedals - that'll help.

Cessna Citation X.
I'll own one when I win the lottery

Eventually once we'd done the climb-descend thing enough times, it was time to head back. The airport was rather busy - for the first time since starting to learn a year ago, I saw another light aircraft in the sky. We ended up holding near the airport, spending a good ten minutes flying in circles before we could come in. When we eventually did, air traffic control warned us that there was something crossing the runway ahead of us. And there it was - right in front of us - a rather bigger and shinier business jet. Fortunately we missed it. "I wonder if it's anyone famous?" my instructor asked as we taxied in. We both peered over, but had no idea who was getting out. I decided not to get them to autograph a blank page in my log book.

Lesson five: It's the wrong plane, Grommit!

Blimey. It's been five months since I last flew. Things happened. I got married. I went on honeymoon. I spent months in penury after my wife frogmarched me into every jewellery shop in the Caribbean.

So, today was the day to get back in the air. I popped along to the flying school, met my instructor (a different one to my last few lessons, but never mind) and... ummm... a different aircraft. Hmm. It seems there'd been some confusion over my booking, and so I'd ended up with a Piper, a hefty four seater rather than the little two seater Cessna I was used to. "Do you want to go in the Piper instead?", well it had been five months and I wasn't going back home without at least flying something.

So, briefing over, we wandered out to the aircraft. It was different: the Cessna's high-wing, so you have to make sure you don't take a lump out of your head on the way in; the Piper's low-wing, and you have to clamber over the wing to get into the cabin. A quick look around the controls and instruments showed that it was the same sort of thing I was used to, but with everything in different places. Baffling.

Being towards the end of a lovely, warm day, we experienced a bit of turbulence around 1,000 feet. The heavier Piper wasn't too affected by it, but as I found out on lesson two my usual Cessna would have been less fun.

We spent some time recapping, to make sure I'd not forgotten it all in the five months since I last flew. Fortunately, all the time spent sitting on the bus reading the book and actually going through the motions using the imaginary control column coming out of the back of the seat in front of me helped. I don't think I got any funny looks while I was doing this on my morning commute; at least I managed to restrain myself from making plane noises while I did it.

Having satisfied himself that I'd managed to remember at least something, my instructor moved onto climbing. It may seem odd that climbing doesn't happen until my fifth lesson, but that's how it is. Quite how I've managed to get this far with the wheels off the ground, I'm not sure. Equally odd is that descending doesn't happen until the next lesson, so the fact that I'm not still up there is a bit of a mystery.

After doing a bit of climbing, we got discussing the aircraft. Back in the flying school office, there were people asking my opinions - how did I find it compared to the Cessna? Everyone seemed to expect me to say that I loved it, and I wanted to fly a Piper from hereon in. Well... I'm not so sure. It's heavier, and it feels that way when you fly it; being light, the Cessna seems to do things so much quicker, and with less persuasion. That said, the Piper did feel more stable. I guess I'm going to have to figure out which one I preferred before my next lesson.

Lesson four: In which a seagull is strangled

Christmas has been and gone. My other half got me my very own plane, too!

I get a real one when I've got my licence, yes?

I also got given a voucher for a flying lesson, fortunately enough with the school that I've already been learning with - a big thumbs up to my ever-generous mother-in-law there! So the voucher and I went to the airport on a cold, but otherwise lovely day. Virtually no wind, good visibility, scarcely a cloud in the sky - who could ask for more?

Same drill as last time, sit down, have a chat. My instructor took me through some stuff that I'd already read about in the book, confirming that I'd understood some of it, and completely got the wrong end of the stick with other bits. And off we went - Exercise 6, Straight and Level flight, which I'd been assured wasn't as easy as it sounded.

Stick wings and a propeller on this. That's
what I'm learning to fly in.

Off we headed: into the aircraft, checks done, taxi to the holding point where we waited for an Emirates A330 to clear the runway - you get a real feel for how big those things are when you're sitting in the airborne equivalent of a Fiat 126 as one goes hurtling past at full throttle.

Up we went, climbing to 4000 feet - with it being a lovely day, the instructor was worried we'd be finding other traffic, so wanted to try and climb above it. As it happened, we didn't see another aircraft all the time we were out.

Things didn't go smoothly at first. I kept forgetting which was round controls worked, pulling the throttle back to idle when I needed more power, using the trimmer upside-down and all sorts. "Those are the two things people tend to get confused" said the instructor, a man who on our previous lesson admitted to managing to pull the mixture out to lean and cutting the engine off on one occasion - apparently the sort of mistake where you quickly learn not to do it a second time.

Although I was doing the majority of the flying, there were points where the instructor took over in order to demonstrate things. Whilst demonstrating how we could fly at more than one speed for a particular power setting, I became aware of a noise in the cockpit - I was informed that this was the stall warning, 'stall' being the term used to describe what happens when a wing stops flying, and starts plummeting.

"I thought it would be louder than that?"
"It gets louder as you get closer to the stall speed. It's like strangling a seagull."
"I wouldn't know."
"Neither would I. But that's what I imagine strangling a seagull would be like."

On my previous lesson, the instructor had taken over for the landing. This time, it seemed that I was going to do most of it. With clearance issued, I did quite a poor job of lining up with the runway but got there eventually. Unlike lessons 1 & 2, I knew what the controls did, and I was being trusted to use them. The instructor, a man whose continuing health was dependent on not letting students do silly things, had his hands near the control column in case I decided to dash us both into the runway.

We were down safely. The look of relief on the face of my flying-phobic fiancée who was waiting at the flying school was palpable.

Next month: The roller coaster ride that is climbing and descending.

Lesson three: Actually learning stuff, and thinking that I'm driving a car

So, after several weeks of horrendous winds, I was feeling hopeful of going up this weekend. And then, midweek, Cyclone Freidhelm (or to use the charming name bestowed on it by the Scottish Twitter community, Hurricane Bawbag) blew in, battering Scotland and Northern England. Although I hadn't pinned my hopes on finally going up this weekend, I kept checking the weather and found it improving. Finally, with me due to leave the house and drive to the airport, I called the flying school to check if I was actually going up.

"Well, there's some heavy snow coming in. Tell you what, call back in half an hour and we'll have a better idea then."

Half an hour and a quick phone call later, I was off to the airport. Getting out of the car, I felt the wind pick up again. It was a fleeting gust though, and before long I found myself being ushered... into an office. Sitting in front of a whiteboard, my instructor started drawing things and talking about them; I could tell that this wasn't going to be another pootling about the sky looking at the scenery lesson. Having only used the control column before, I was suddenly hearing other controls mentioned. Thankfully, I'd been doing some reading, so the instructor wasn't suddenly hitting me with too much new information. The one bit of new information that I hadn't expected was the bit about how the lesson was going to go: "I'll do the radio, you're going to do everything else" was the gist of it.

And so we walked out to the aircraft. Sorry, make that my aircraft - I did say in the post about the last lesson that I would claim ownership if I got the same one three times running.

Sitting in the left hand seat, the next thing I knew, I was being given a book. A book? I'm here to fly, not to read!

OK, so not just any book. This was the aircraft checklist, which takes the pilot through what they need to be doing at various stages. The crew of the next commercial flight you take will probably be using one, which you can take in one of two ways. Either "Oh, that's good. They're being thorough, and making sure that nothing's missed out." or alternatively "They have to look at a book to fly this thing? I thought they were qualified? Let me off!".

Going through the checklist, it felt as if we were on the ground for an absolute age, and it's only when you see it all written down you realise how much stuff is checked before the engine's even started. Just for my little Cessna, there are 20 steps from the time you enter the aircraft until getting the engine started (not including the three pages of external checks, which my instructor had already carried out).  This is followed by another 39 steps after starting the engine, but before taking off!

And so, having checked (and double checked) an awful lot of things, we were finally ready to take off. The checklist got stowed (by which I mean chucked in the luggage space behind the seats), and we were heading onto the runway. Specifically, I was heading onto the runway. I was steering the thing. And then I did the takeoff. This wasn't new; I'd been present for two takeoffs in the same aircraft, only this time I wasn't merely sitting back as someone else did it. Frankly, if you asked me how the takeoff went, I couldn't tell you. Everything was a blur, but as take off doesn't get formally taught until much later in the syllabus, I'm not too upset about that.

As in my last lesson, we headed for the city centre first; there are some great landmarks for when you're learning to fly visually. Then we headed South for a change. The weather wasn't great - the cloud was quite low in places, and it wasn't long before I discovered that planes don't have windscreen wipers. Although we got blown about a bit, it wasn't as bad as my second lesson, and having had a good word with myself after that one, I didn't get too worked up about it. We got to where were going... and spent the next 40 minutes flying in circles.

Why flying in circles? Well, this lesson was about the controls rather than the previous two which have been about getting a general feel for the aircraft. Starting with the control column - I thought I'd got this one nailed, but my pre-lesson reading had told me that the controls have several effects; pull the column back, and you climb, but also start to go more slowly. That sort of thing.

One might think that flying in circles for 40 minutes would get dull, but the things I was learning about were coming so thick and fast that the scenery barely got a look in. It wasn't until I looked at my watch that I realised how long I'd been there.

On the way back, progress was slow; there was quite a headwind, although it was fairly steady so we didn't get blown about too much. Looking over to my left, it was amazing to see how a certain type of weather can suddenly stop - there was a clearly visible line between a rain shower and a patch of glorious sunshine, something you don't get to see from ground level.

We flew across the city again, and approached the airport. More checks (also in the checklist) before we landed. My instructor handled the landing, leaving me to get the aircraft back to where we would park it.

Now, here's the interesting bit: the control column does nothing on the ground - when you're taxying, it's all done with your feet. I had a disconcerting moment as I tried to turn with what my brain was now convinced was a steering wheel, but soon got the hang of steering with my hands resting on my lap.

Pulling up to where we going to park (with me almost forgetting that I was steering something a tad wider than a car, and the instructor having to steer me away from another plane that I was about to clip with a wingtip), we came to a stop. And got the checklist out again. Yes, there's even checks for shutting the thing down.

All in all, a great lesson. Now to go and read that bit of the training manual again, and start reading up for the next one!

Better to be down here...

"Better to be down here wishing you were up there, than up there wishing you were down here", as someone or other once said.

Well, one half of that truism currently describes me. And as I'm not stupid enough to try writing a blog post whilst airborne, it's got to be the first one. I'm grounded. I was grounded last Sunday, too. With winds at 18 knots, gusting to 28 - and an aircraft with a limit of 17, it just ain't happening.

Oh well, I guess it saves me clearing the snow off the car.

Another lesson booked for next Saturday. Here's hoping I'll be up there, and not wishing I was somewhere else.